First volume of Moomin: The Complete Comic Strip, November 2006! (USA / Canada)

Fantastic news for fans of comics and great writing - and especially for fans of Tove Jansson and the Moomins!

In November 2006, comic publishers Drawn and Quarterly released a hardback collection of the Moomin comic strips which Tove wrote for the London Evening News between 1954 and 1960. These strips form a series of 'adventures', and this first volume includes four of these: Brigands, Family Life, Moomin on the Riviera and Moomin's Desert Island.

There will be four further volumes (one each year, for the next four years), collecting all of Tove's strips for the newspaper.

This is the first book publication of Moomin comic strips in English since 1957! In 1957, Allan Wingate appeared to begin a series of Moomin comic strip books when they published three adventures as Moomin 1 - but no further volumes ever appeared.

I was very keen to see these films, but the timing made it impossible - they were screened on
the same day we were expecting our first child to be born! So I didn't go... and William was born
three days later :-)

Articles in the press indicated that this film festival also toured the
UK during 2004 - but unfortunately, neither film is yet available on DVD in the UK / US.

Who Will Comfort Toffle? published, October 2003 (UK)

Sort Of Books
has published a new translation of
Who Will Comfort Toffle? -
the book became available in late October 2003. The previous English edition of
this title (translated, I think, by Kingsley Hart) had been out of print
for a long time.

Like the popular 2001 edition of The Book about Moomin, Mymble and Little My,
the new Toffle is translated / adapted by the poet Sophie Hannah.

Moominvalley in November republished, September 2003 (USA)

Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Moominvalley in November in the US
in September 2003, in both
hardback
and
paperback
editions. The book had been out
of print for several years, so this is great news for American Moomin fans.

Now all we need is for someone to persuade Penguin Books to publish a new
edition of Moominpappa at Sea in the UK!

The Summer Book released, May 2003 (UK)

Sort Of Books began the 21st-century Tove Jansson revival by publishing a
stunning new edition of The Summer Book, one of her most popular
books for adults.

The book got into a lot
of top-seller lists and received strong reviews - here are links to reviews
from the
Guardian
and the
Observer
newspapers.

This site, The Moomin Trove, created in September 2003

Originally I created a web page listing my collection of Tove Jansson books to help myself avoid
buying the same book twice! Late in 2003 I decided to redesign my site and add more
content - and I expect to add more scans, reviews and synopses soon. My wife Katy
came up with the Moomin Trove name :-)

For anyone interested in the technical side of this site, the domain is rented through
the UK company XCalibre. The collection pages
are generated using a C++ program I wrote, though I may shift it all to Perl at
some point.

My book cover scans were made using Mustek and later Canon scanners, and all
other graphics were designed with Paintshop Pro. I created the static text and template pages
using the wonderful Textpad text editor.